


We fight, they say, for breath

by lbmisscharlie



Series: Still the Walls Do Not Fall [6]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: (or supposed death), Academia, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/F, Family, Female Bucky Barnes, Female Steve Rogers, Genderqueer Bucky Barnes, Genderqueer Character, Interviews, POV Outsider, Post-Captain America: The First Avenger, references to canon character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-08
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-03-15 15:47:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13616556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lbmisscharlie/pseuds/lbmisscharlie
Summary: Special Collections File 2007018 — Jamie Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes and Siobhan Grace “Steve” RogersThis collection contains material related to two working class women who grew up in Brooklyn in the 1920s and 30s. “Bucky” Barnes is known to have enlisted as a man in the US Army in 1942, while “Steve” Rogers served with the USO from 1942-3. Both died in 1945, though their activities and whereabouts from late 1943 until their deaths are unknown. Contains photographs, letters, sketchbooks, and other loose memorabilia collected from their shared home in Brooklyn in 1942 and from their personal effects after their deaths. Donated by Susanna Edwards, nee Barnes, “Bucky” Barnes’s sister. [0.417 linear feet] See also file 2007017





	We fight, they say, for breath

Lesbian Herstory Archives  
Brooklyn, NY

Special Collections File 2007017 — Nari Park’s _As True as the Rest_

This collection contains research material related to Dr. Nari Park’s book _As True as the Rest: Women’s Gender Identity During WWII_ (2006). Park, a lesbian feminist historian, intended to write a book on lesbian women working on the home front during WWII. After an interview with one of her subjects in which she learned about the subject’s sister, who enlisted as a man in the US Army, her focus shifted to what we might think of as queer gender identities during the war. Included in the collection are interview tapes and transcripts as well as early drafts of _As True as the Rest_. [1.25 linear feet] See also file 2007018.

Special Collections File 2007018 — Jamie Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes and Siobhan Grace “Steve” Rogers

This collection contains material related to two working class women who grew up in Brooklyn in the 1920s and 30s. “Bucky” Barnes is known to have enlisted as a man in the US Army in 1942, while “Steve” Rogers served with the USO from 1942-3. Both died in 1945, though their activities and whereabouts from late 1943 until their deaths are unknown. Contains photographs, letters, sketchbooks, and other loose memorabilia collected from their shared home in Brooklyn in 1942 and from their personal effects after their deaths. Donated by Susanna Edwards, nee Barnes, “Bucky” Barnes’s sister. [0.417 linear feet] See also file 2007017

Box 1, Tape 3.4 

10/16/1998   
Brooklyn — Subject’s home

Subject: Susanna Edwards (nee Barnes), born 1924

Dr. Nari Park: Thank you for inviting me to your home, Mrs Edwards. And for participating.

SE: You’re welcome. I hope I can be of help — I don’t know that my experiences were that interesting.

NP: I’m really looking for the everyday experiences of women, so it’s all interesting to me.

SE: Well, you’re very kind.

NP: Could we start with what you did during the war?

SE: Of course. The first year the US was in the war, 1942, I was still in school. I took some extra classes and finished up early, so that when I turned seventeen and the factories would take me, I could get a job. I worked at first as a riveter, then a welder. In the Brooklyn shipyards, for a couple different outfits. In about ‘44 I think I took some extra training on to become a mechanic on the ship engines. The union heads resisted letting girls do that for a long time, because it was skilled labor and higher on the pay scale. But I think they figured out we were useful in the tight spaces. [laughs]

NP: You lived at home during this time.

SE: Yes, until I married in ‘48.

NP: Did you identify as a lesbian at that time, in any way?

SE: Well, I don’t know that I’d call myself a lesbian now. I was married to Richard for twenty years, you know.

NP: No, of course, I apologize. Is there a term you prefer?

SE: I think they use ‘bisexual’ these days. [laughs]. You’re absolutely right, though; when I met Norah we all used lesbian. That was in ‘72 or so? It was a political thing, you know. When I was a girl, the names weren’t very nice. Though I think some of the gals liked them that much more.

NP: What kind of names?

SE: Oh, gosh. I mean, queer — it meant a lot of things, those days, but in the right tone — 

And invert, bulldagger, bulldyke — those were for a certain kind. There weren’t a lot of terms for the gals who looked just like the rest, you know?

NP: Did that affect you? Not having a term, I mean.

SE: Oh, I don’t know. [Pause] I didn’t really think of myself that way. Not until much later. I did — I did like the things the other girls liked, and I was only seventeen when we got into the war. And then there was too much else to think about. I think I was called a ‘late bloomer’ once or twice. Always sounded like code for ‘early spinster,’ if you ask me. 

NP: [laughs] I’ve been called that too.

SE: And when I was younger, before the war — well, I saw firsthand what it meant to be one of them. A bulldagger, I mean. And it wasn’t easy.

NP: Firsthand? What do you mean?

SE: Oh, well, Bucky was always coming home with scrapes and bruises from this or the other. And she never quite fit in. It was like she — like the world was always pushing against her, rubbing her raw.

NP: Bucky?

SE: [pause] Bucky, yes. My sister.

[sound of paper shuffling]

NP: Rebecca, you mean? Your older sister?

SE: Oh, no. Bucky — Jamie Buchanan. Named for our father — Ma thought it was absolutely absurd. She was the eldest.

NP: I don’t see her —

SE: Oh. [pause] That’s right — I didn’t — Oh, damn it, it’s been long enough, I think I can talk about it now. Can I see that? [Note: NP passes SE the family history form she had filled out a few months earlier upon agreeing to be an interview subject. SE writes in more information]. She should be just here. Born 1917. After Bucky died, you see, a woman visited us and said something about national security. It needed to be a secret. I shouldn’t probably — but it has been long enough.

NP: I don’t under— Could you start from the beginning?

SE: I’m the only one left in my family, now, other than Rebecca’s children. But there were four of us: Bucky, Rebecca, me, and Miriam. I was close to Miriam, and Rebecca taught me so much as we grew up, but Bucky — Bucky was untouchable. Like this — [pause]. She fought with Ma something fierce, but she always seemed to do what she wanted anyway. And her way wasn’t like what any other girl did.

NP: What was it like?

SE: It was, well — Bucky was queer, in lots of the ways we used it then. We never talked about it, mind. Not even without our parents around — or at least, she didn’t with me. I mean, she had Steve, and she was closer in age to Rebecca; she didn’t need her baby sisters hanging around all the time.

NP: Steve?

SE: Steve, yes. Steve was — she was like a fifth sister to us, really. Bucky must have met her sometime after I was born — Steve was Rebecca’s age, so — but it seems to me that Steve was always there. If Steve wasn’t at our house after school, then Bucky was at hers. And I — I don’t really know, or remember, but Steve was really sickly, so Bucky would spend a lot of time keeping her company. And then, of course, they had their own apartment when the war started.

NP: I — I don’t know where to start. Um. Do you remember Steve’s full name? It’s an odd name for a little girl.

SE: Oh, gosh, no one called her anything but Steve. Rogers — her last name, I remember that. The first was something Irish, though, I think. She and Bucky met at Catholic school — or she might have met Rebecca first? It might come to me, just let me think on it.

NP: That’s okay — just if you remember. You said they had their own apartment?

SE: Yes, oh, we were all so jealous. This would have been in, oh gosh, I was in high school. Maybe ‘37? ‘38? Before the war. Steve’s Ma died, I remember that — she borrowed one of my dresses for the funeral. I don’t know why I remember that. [pause] It was my only black dress, so I had to wear navy. I didn’t really realize until then that Steve was poor — or poorer than us, I suppose. She stayed with us, afterward. Not for long — Bucky found an apartment and they moved out.

I mostly remember the fight. Ma and Bucky fought all the time — Bucky could shout when she was angry, my goodness. But this time, we walked on eggshells for weeks after; Ma did nothing but stomp and throw plates on the table and glare at us. I was so mad at Bucky! She got everything she wanted, and we had to stay behind and take the consequences.

[pause]

That was maybe one of the worst fights they ever had. I think I know now that Ma only got like that when she was scared. Girls didn’t live alone in those days, you know. And Ma knew about Bucky — she had to, even if she wouldn’t ever say — so she must have been scared about that, too. It wasn’t illegal, exactly, you know, to be a bulldyke, but the police did raid some of the places Bucky probably went, and there were plenty of fellas ready to beat up girls like her. 

NP: Tell me more about Bucky. How did you all — know?

SE: [laughs] People pretend all sorts of ignorances, always have. But if you looked at Bucky — I never saw her wear a dress in my life. We had the word ‘tomboy,’ you know, but you were supposed to grow out of it. Bucky could box, and she worked the floor of a slaughterhouse, and she wore her hair short, and so she didn’t.

NP: Didn’t what?

SE: Didn’t grow out of it! 

NP: [laughs] I see. Did she keep working at the slaughterhouse through the war?

SE: No. [pause] I don’t know if this will fit — if this is the type of thing you’re writing about. It’s been a secret for a long time, and I don’t even know if it’s really my story to tell. But I’m all that’s left, and I don’t want Bucky to be forgotten. She was — she was so brave. [pause] If I tell you this, I want you to use it. Or to put it somewhere, in writing, at least.

NP: I — what you’ve told me so far is very compelling. I will be transcribing this, and all of my interviews, and I hope to find a place for them. [pause] Your words, and your stories — everyone’s that I’m talking to — they mean so much to me.

[long pause]

SE: The world has changed a lot. I’m glad to have seen so much of it, that I can share that. 

But — about Bucky. I told you one of the biggest fights Bucky ever had with our Ma was when she moved out? Well, the biggest, the angriest and most scared I’ve ever seen my ma, was when Bucky came home and told us she’d signed up for the Army.

NP: The Women’s Army Corps?

SE: No — the Army. To this day, I don’t know the whole story. I think she thought she might be protecting us by not telling us, but — She got to leave that night, after the fight, and send home letters like nothing had happened, and we had to —. The thing is, we were four girls, five with Steve. Even once the US got into the war, we didn’t think it would hit our family. And the goddamn thing of it was, that in the end we got four — four — telegrams. 

NP: Wow. Um. Let me clarify — your sister disguised herself as a man in order to join the US Army?

SE: If you want to put it in those terms. It wasn’t really a disguise. I don’t know — we didn’t talk about it, and we didn’t have some of the words young folks have today, but I’d say it was more like one part of her than a disguise. Just one part that was as true as the rest. 

NP: Hmm. Go on.

SE: You know, I think I have some photographs around here. There wasn’t much of Bucky and Steve’s apartment, after. Rebecca kept most of it, and when she passed I packed up some of it. Norah and I didn’t have much space, as you can see, but it seemed — well, I couldn’t let them be forgotten entirely. Just give me a moment.

NP: Of course. Can I help?

SE: Yes, come along, you can carry the box.

[break in recording]

[papers shuffling]

SE: See, here, this is all of them. I took these — my first camera! Just a little Brownie, but I lugged it around everywhere. [Note: See file 2007018. Subject holds item 2007018.04, showing four figures, L-R: Rebecca Barnes (later Proctor), Jamie Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes, Siobhan Grace “Steve” Rogers, Miriam Barnes. Taken 1942] This was in the spring, before she signed up. See, here’s Rebecca, then Bucky and Steve, and Miriam. 

NP: Bucky and Steve look very close. Were they —? [Note: in the photograph, JB Barnes’s arm is around SG Rogers’s neck, and while Barnes looks at the camera, Rogers looks up at Barnes’s face]

SE: Well, that’s a question for the ages. [laughs] I don’t know. They lived together, sure, but Bucky would sometimes joke about Steve’s future marriage, like it was just something temporary. But, if I had to say, I’d say that you didn’t have to know Bucky well to know that she loved Steve about as much as any person could love another. And Steve, well. I don’t have any proof — they didn’t tell us much about the circumstances — but I would swear that Steve died of a broken heart after Bucky was gone. Even if that wasn’t what actually killed her. 

NP: God. I. Um. What can you tell me about Bucky’s time in service?

SE: Not much — She left for training a couple of days after telling us she’d signed up, and then we never saw her again. I think there was supposed to be leave before she shipped overseas, but it got canceled? Or — well, at the time I was still so angry at her, I might have convinced myself Bucky decided not to come home, that she didn’t need us anymore. But in retrospect — well. 

Her letters were — well, I’ve got a couple of them here somewhere, I can let you look through them later if you’d like. They were censored, not a lot — I think Bucky was already good at being circumspect, you know, given the circumstances. But we tried to piece together where she went, and some of it was revealed later. North Africa, at first, and then part of the invasion into Italy. Sometime after that we got the first telegram.

NP: You said there were four, overall? But I thought —

SE: Well, I said Bucky was unusual. [laughs]. You have to know what the telegram means, right? The whole street would go still, hoping the uniformed man wasn’t coming to your doorstep. There were times when the news was good, as we found out later, but you couldn’t dare hope. As far as the street knew, anyway, we had one girl in the WAC and no reason to fear. 

NP: Was that the cover story?

SE: It had to be, didn’t it? If someone from the Army found out, Bucky would be — well, I don’t know, I don’t know what the punishment was. But it wouldn’t have been good. 

NP: But the first telegram?

SE: Yes. He stopped at our door. And we all knew — it was Ma and Miriam and me at home that afternoon, for the first one. It said that Bucky had been taken prisoner and was presumed dead.

NP: God.

SE: I think we — or I, at least, had been hoping that — that she had been found out, is all, and was being sent home, or. Even a trial, a court martial, would have been better. Not this horrible uncertainty. You know, when you see that “presumed,” you hope. You hope so much, even though you know there’s no chance at all. 

NP: Did you find out what did happen to her later? Was she —?

SE: [laughs] Oh, she was alive. It was the Battle of Azzano — there’s not a lot out there about it. I think some of it has been sealed. But the Allies lost a lot of men, and something like 200 were taken prisoner. And then rescued, in circumstances that remain a little unclear. 

NP: But you have your suspicions? 

[pause]

SE: We didn’t get a lot of letters from either of them, after they both left, but something Steve said in her first letter after that second telegram — I, I’m sorry, I don’t think this is making sense. Let me — 

NP: Of course.

[papers rustling]

SE: Here it is. See, Steve left just after Bucky. I don’t have those letters anymore, the first ones, but she was very vague about what she was doing, and then, out of the blue one day we get this poster folded up in the mail. [Note: See file 2007018. Subject holds item 2007018.15, a paper broadsheet for the “Captain America and Miss Victory USA Show” in Cleveland, April 3-5, 1943. Miss Victory USA, a blonde “Rosie the Riveter” type in a boiler suit and head-kerchief is circled, with the word “ME!” written in now-faded blue ink]

NP: She joined the USO?

SE: Yup. Had no idea she could even dance. Well — we saw the show in New York; she couldn’t, really. Anyway, she traveled around that whole year, and then we got a letter saying the show was headed to Europe. Two weeks later, that first telegram, and then nothing for three weeks. We were — we were like a house of ghosts, wandering through our lives, not really speaking.

NP: And then?

SE: And then, on the same day, we got the second telegram saying Bucky had been found and was alive, and a letter from Steve saying not much that was understandable, but that she found Bucky — that’s what she said, found, not saw, which I suppose is innocuous enough, used casually. That she found Bucky, that her job was changing, and that — I’ll always remember this, even though I haven’t seen that letter in fifty years. She said that she’d watch out for Bucky, that they wouldn’t be parted again.

NP: Wow. You think —

SE: This will sound crazy, but Steve was different when we saw her at the USO show before she left. Healthy, bigger even. I don’t know — there’s nothing to back me up on this at all, except years of knowing them, but there’s a part of me that’s always thought that Steve had something to do with Bucky’s rescue, with all those soldiers who were rescued. It sounds ridiculous, I know. But I watched the two of them follow each other everywhere, into fights and everything else, and if anyone could do something impossible, it’d be Steve.

NP: I don’t even know how to take this in.

SE: [laugh] I sound like a raving old woman, I know. My mind’s all still here, I promise. 

NP: [laugh] I can tell, don’t worry. [pause] What about after the second telegram, after you knew Bucky was safe?

SE: Well, I think Ma hoped she’d be sent home. As a POW, she probably should have been. But she stayed on. [pause] [papers shuffling] The letters got really slow after that — maybe only a couple more came? I don’t have those ones anymore. I don’t know if Ma got rid of them, or if Rebecca put them somewhere else. These ones here are what was left of Bucky and Steve’s personal possessions, that came back after their deaths. [Note: See file 2007018. Subject flipped through the letters (2007018.25-38), arranged by date, with both correspondents’ letters mixed together] And see, they didn’t write one another after the rescue. And here — [Note: See file 2007018. Subject opened item 2007018.13, sketchbook belonging to SG “Steve” Rogers] Steve started sketching Bucky again. See — she’s in her uniform. Those are the only images we have of her in uniform.

NP: They were together.

SE: They were. That’s the only proof I have, but it has to be true.

NP: You don’t know anything about what they were doing?

SE: Not a single idea. Something secret. Still is, somewhere — it’s got to be written somewhere, in a filing cabinet behind a locked door, forgotten.

NP: Wow. And they both died during the war?

SE: Yes. [pause] Those were telegrams three and four. Bucky on February 28th in 1945, and Steve exactly a week later. 

NP: And you think —

SE: They told us nothing about where they died, or how. I still don’t know. They were both fighters, and lucky as hell. But Steve — I told you Steve was real sick as a kid, well. She probably should have died once or twice, bad as it was. When I was little I always figured Bucky was the one to get them into trouble, when she’d come home scrapped up. But I think later I figured out that it was Steve that wouldn’t back down from a fight. Steve who threw everything into everything she did. Bucky was really all she had, I think.

So, Steve would have been — I’m not even sure, but inconsolable, I think, after Bucky’s death. I know that, I know it in my heart, even though I wasn’t there. To have her die just a week later? It’s not a coincidence.

NP: That’s — wow. I don’t know what to think. This is more than I expected, much more. 

SE: [laugh] Bucky and Steve were more than most people expected, I think. 

End tape 3.4. See tape 3.5 for continuation of interview with S.E. regarding her own service during the war.

++

Excerpt from _As True as the Rest: Women’s Gender Identity During WWII_ (2006)

The example of Jamie Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes, for instance, confirms the historical hypothesis that, as with every previous war in American history, individuals assigned female at birth did join the regular, non-auxiliary Armed Forces and did fight, and, indeed, did die for causes they believed in very deeply. Barnes, born in 1917 in Brooklyn, enlisted in the US Army in 1942 and served in the 107th in North Africa and Italy, before being taken hostage by Axis forces and presumed dead. Barnes, along with 163 other POWs, was freed in a rescue in November of 1943, about which little information is publicly available. After this rescue, Barnes continued to serve until her death in 1945, although no information regarding the battles or movements in which she took part or in which she died is publicly available. For Bucky, I use female pronouns, following the example of her sister, from whom I gathered the majority of my information regarding Bucky’s life and service. Like all the subjects of my book, I do not seek to “reveal” particular gender identities; rather, I bring forward their stories in order to explore the spaces available in the 1940s for individuals assigned female at birth to play with, define, and determine their own gender expressions. While we colloquially understand that the wartime period was one in which women had, for a limited time, access to greater amounts of autonomy, this study goes further to suggest, even more precisely, that the institutions and cultural mores of wartime allowed gender non-conforming women of all stripes opportunities to assert their gender identities by leveraging the language of nationalism. That is, by calling upon everyone in the nation to serve, state networks of power inadvertently enabled the agency of individuals assigned female at birth to negotiate the performatives of both gender and national belonging, allowing public expressions of gender that flirt with, but do not fully cleave to wartime gender roles. 

++

Item 2007018.38 Letter to Jamie Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes from Siobhan Grace “Steve” Rogers, dated October 14th, 1943.

Bucky,

I’m writing this on the boat crossing the Atlantic. It’s crowded — I’m sharing with half a dozen gals from the chorus line, which means our bunk is one big cloud of Soir de Paris. You’d love it. Thankfully, the perfume covers the fact that some of the girls didn’t take so well to life on the sea. Not me, you’ll be surprised to hear. I don’t seem to get sick anymore — a big change from the Cyclone! 

I’m writing this on deck — it’s freezing, and I’m sorry if my ink is a little smeared, but a constant mist comes up off the sea — and looking at the black of the ocean and thinking about swimming with you at Coney Island. Of diving down under the waves and feeling them push me this way and that and knowing you’d be there, standing, grimacing at the cold, when I turn myself right side up again. You’re always there when I get up again.

Once we’ve landed, we’ll be doing a tour of shows all across the Front. They haven’t told us where, yet — though I wouldn’t write it down even if they had! — but I hope we get to where you are. We always talked about seeing Europe together. I hope to see you. I miss you.

Yours,  
Steve

**Author's Note:**

> As an academic, one of my favorite CA tropes is the "academic world analyzes the presence and history of Captain America" theme, so I couldn't resist adding my own for this 'verse.


End file.
